Facebook’s new ‘Lists’ feature aims to get users to share more about themselves

Facebook has begun rolling out a new ‘Lists’ feature to encourage users to share more personal content.

With the feature, users will be able to share lists that detail such things as New Year’s Resolutions, travel wishlists and daily tasks. Lists can then be customized with coloured backgrounds and emojis.

The feature will appear in the ‘What’s on your mind?’ status update box.

As of now, Lists is only available to select users, but the feature is currently being rolled out globally to a wider audience.

The Lists feature is part of Facebook’s larger effort to drive user engagement by focusing more on personal content. In December 2017, the company rolled out a ‘Did You Know?’ feature that encourages users to answer short questions about themselves to share with friends.

Following that, Facebook announced that it would be prioritizing appearances from content that comes from friends or family over publishers in the News Feed. As a result, posts from people that users know will appear more often than those from public pages such as news sites. There is no release window for this change, however.

Locally-sourced news is also set to appear more often in the News Feed later this year, according to Facebook.